'm just wondering - does this belong on a Perl site? Is Perlmonks turning into long-summaries-of-basic-programming-theory monks?

If it were just talking about programming theory in the abstract I might agree, but perl was used to illustrate specific examples - so I say it belongs here.

The theory may not interest you, but it does interest me (and judging by the node rep quite a few others too). I'm finding it an interesting refresher on stuff I learned many years ago when I was at university - and doing it in the context of perl is an interesting twist.